


The Elven Word for Tal-Vashoth

by russian_blue



Series: Missing Spokes on the Conversational Wheel [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: ALL THE SPOILERS, Dalish Elven Culture and Customs, F/M, Friendship, Missing Scene, Qunari Culture and Customs, Solas does not appear in this fic, Trespasser DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 10:03:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7569901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/pseuds/russian_blue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the Inquisitor's companions, only one really understands what's happening to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Elven Word for Tal-Vashoth

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the Trespasser DLC, fairly near the end -- so spoilers for, uh, just about everything.
> 
> Third in a series of headcanon scenes based on narrative/conversational options I would have taken if Bioware had written them into the game -- aka, this fic is basically the reason I wrote this series in the first place.

Iron Bull knows he should have kept an eye on her. But they weren't back for half a second before the Inquisitor was dragged off by Cass -- sorry, the Divine Victoria -- and while she was reporting on what they'd found, Iron Bull went to deliver an abbreviated version of it to Blackwall -- sorry, Rainier -- and the others, and a little while after that he realizes he has no idea where she's gone.

And that, right there, is a bad sign.

But an ex-Ben-Hassrath spy can't spend years in the Inquisition and not learn a few things. Sera already knows all the good hiding places; after that it's just a matter of asking Cole and translating the gibberish he gets in return so he can narrow down the field. He finds her on a bench in a little side garden somebody obviously designed for not-entirely-secret trysts. It's empty apart from the Inquisitor, and Bull wonders whether that's because everybody attending the conclave is on their best behavior, or because one look at Verai drove them off.

Not that she's showing much expression at all. No, she's sitting there with a face as still and blank as a statue's -- which is a hell of a lot scarier.

Bull goes over and sits down next to her, without asking permission. She's just far enough off-center on the bench to leave room for him; he chooses to take that as an invitation. And she doesn't tell him to go away.

"Hey, boss."

No response. Bull sighs. "I'm not going to ask if you're okay," he says. "We both know the answer to that."

She stares at the trellis on the opposite side, not blinking. "What do you want, Bull?"

Normally he would say something entertainingly crude, like _me on Dorian's cock and somebody else on mine._ Not today. "You want to talk about it?"

Her mouth opens. He can see her lips shaping the word _no_.

But then her shoulders sag.

"I can't talk to any of them," she whispers, gaze dropping. "They're all Andrastian -- Dorian, Blackwall, even Varric -- not Cole, but he . . . I can't take the way he sees things, not right now. And Sera --" Her mouth twists in a vicious line. "She'll never have a better opportunity to laugh at me."

"She might surprise you," Bull says.

Verai doesn't answer that. Her jaw tenses, and then she says, "You're the only one who might understand."

What they saw out there, in the places the eluvians took them to. He isn't an elf, but he also isn't Andrastian. He isn't going to say, _of course your gods were false all along._

Neither would any of the others, he thinks. Well, maybe Viv. But he understands why Verai isn't willing to risk it.

One pale, slender hand rises briefly, then falls. She says, almost at random, "When we were back in Haven, right after I closed the Breach for the first time, he said something to me about how the Dalish are just children, acting out mangled stories we don't understand. I told him that I knew what we were making wasn't Arlathan as it had been in the past -- how could it be? But it didn't matter. Not to me, anyway. What mattered was that we were building something that's _elven_. Not human."

Iron Bull waits. One of the things a spy learns is to let people keep talking, rather than interrupting them with questions. They'll get there faster if he doesn't prod.

"Then this." He thinks at first that she means what they've learned, but one finger twitches upward, and he realizes what her hand was doing before. Stopping short of touching the tattoo on her face -- _vallaslin_ , the Dalish call it.

Now she does stop, and so he prods. "The mark?"

"A slave mark." The words come out bitter as poison. "That's what they were -- he told me, after the Temple of Mythal. And I told him that I didn't care. Because it didn't matter what they _used_ to mean. All that mattered was what they meant now."

He almost stays quiet again. Then, with an internal kick, he reminds himself that he isn't a spy anymore. He's a friend, and friends offer support. So he says, "That sounds like pretty good reasoning to me."

Except that she spoke in the past tense.

She's up and off the bench before he knows it, stalking away with a jarring stride, like she's driving spikes down into the earth with her heels. " _Good?_ I told him it was a mark of pride." A short, wild laugh, strangled before it gets very far. "Pride. Ironic -- that's what his name means. Pride in being an elf, I said; pride in the elven past. It's a way of showing our connection to the past, to the glories of our civilization, to the faith we have in our gods."

She stops dead, and the rising tide of her voice drops until it's nearly inaudible. "The faith we _had_."

The faith she used to have. Before they went through the eluvian.

Bull's still trying to find words when she whispers, "Corypheus."

Two years dead and gone -- isn't he? "What about him?" If that blighted bastard is back somehow . . . .

The gaze she turns on him is hollow and dead. "We used to worship Corypheus."

Not the actual Corypheus, the ancient magister from Tevinter. Bull follows her around that curve, and wishes he hadn't. Wishes she'd never gone around it herself. The elven gods -- they were mages, powerful enough that they declared themselves to be more, and others bowed down to worship them.

Exactly like Corypheus tried to do.

He isn't fast enough to catch her. She sinks to the manicured lawn of the side garden, and all Bull can do is drop to his knees at her side, one hand outstretched to make sure she doesn't collapse entirely. She's _tiny_ next to him; he could span her entire back with his hand. Tiny and . . . fragile. He used that word once, in his thoughts when he first met her, because he never ceases to marvel at how elves don't just snap in half -- but after that, never. Because if there's one thing Verai Lavellan is not, it's fragile. She's made of dragonbone; she can survive anything.

Except, perhaps, this.

She doesn't cry. Maybe it would be better if she did, but she just sits there, staring at nothing, with Iron Bull's hand holding her up. And now he can see all the fracture lines, everything she's been hiding since the conclave began -- no, before that. Since they defeated Corypheus and he vanished. Since the Temple of Mythal, where she met those tight-assed Sentinel elves and started to learn that the past wasn't what she thought.

She's been cracking apart all this time, and he didn't see. Because she could survive it. She _did_ survive it. Until now: the last tap of the hammer that makes the whole thing come apart.

"How do you do it?" she whispers, without looking at him.

Right now she needs support, wisdom, glue to hold herself together. All Bull can manage is: "Huh?"

She turns to look at him, that dead, hollow gaze, a void where something vital used to be. "How do you survive being Tal-Vashoth?"

All the breath goes out of him. _Fuck._

Because that's exactly what she is. She never followed the Qun, never knew the certainty and foundation it provided . . . but she had her own ways, her own world that gave her strength. And now that's been ripped away.

It wasn't even her choice. Bull is the one who decided to _be_ the Iron Bull instead of Hissrad, to rescue his Chargers instead of the dreadnought, abandoning the Qun because he couldn't pay its price. But all Verai did was walk through a mirror, and find her world's twisted reflection on the other side.

In her own way, she's Tal-Vashoth. Just like he is. And fuck if _he_ doesn't almost cry right there, because who helped him pull out of it back when the wound was still raw? Solas. They didn't even like each other very much, but Solas was still there for him, forcing him to use his mind when everything the Qun taught said he was doomed to be nothing more than a beast. They dance around his name, all of them left in the Inquisition, because it's a wound that hasn't healed. If Solas were here, if he hadn't left, then Verai _would_ find a way to pull through. Without him . . .

But Solas wasn't the only one. Bull swallows down the lump in his own throat and says, "You survive because your friends help you."

Friends. They've become that less and less over the years, in their various ways, because duties take them away or tension pushes them apart, and because she's the Inquisitor. She has followers and agents and allies and advisors and a handful of trusted lieutenants . . . but for people in positions of command, _friends_ are hard.

She may not be the Inquisitor for much longer, though. And whatever title she holds right now, Iron Bull is fucked -- and not in the fun way -- if he'll let that divide separate them. If he'll let her crack and shatter while he just stands by and watches.

"Dorian," he says. "Cole. Varric. Blackwall. You think those sunburst robes will stop Cass from being there when you need her? And if you think Sera will laugh at you, then you haven't learned one fucking thing about what the word 'friend' means to her." He shifts his hands, grips her by the shoulders. "And me. I've survived. You will, too."

Her pale fingers come up to grip his wrists. They don't wrap even a third of the way around, but the pressure is strong just the same. She hasn't lost all fight yet.

Then the Anchor in her left hand flares, and her breath hisses between her teeth.

"Come on," Bull says, pulling her to her feet. "We're with you, every step of the way."

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read the first two fics in this series, you have a sense of how I'd decided my Inquisitor viewed the entire Dalish enterprise and its relationship with the past. Which is why it was such a fucking *gut punch* when I got to Trespasser and hit all the revelations about what elven society used to be like -- because her entire worldview was based on taking pride in that past even if they don't remember it perfectly, and then she found out that all of their gods were just like Corypheus. I've never been so shattered by a video game in my *life*, y'all. And I thought about how none of her companions would really understand, because they weren't elves* . . . but Iron Bull would understand, because I'd sent him down the Tal-Vashoth path, and really, that's basically what just happened to my Inquisitor. So this fic happened, and then there needed to be fics before and after for the setup and fallout.
> 
> *Credit to Sera: when I went to talk to her and there was an option to bring up the elven gods thing, I _didn't take it_ \-- even though I'm a total completist about talking to people -- because I couldn't deal with her laughing at me for having believed in the gods. But after I walked away, the completist impulse kept nagging at me. So I saved my game and went back, with the intention of taking that option, letting her mock me, and then reverting to my saved game, so that it would be "canon" that my Inquisitor never heard that. And Sera . . . just about made me cry. It's the one time in the entire game that I felt actual friendship for her, because she was a friend to my Inquisitor at the moment when she most needed it.
> 
> But I still wish I could have talked to Iron Bull instead. :-P


End file.
